Daniels: An Open Letter to the People of Purdue

January 18, 2013

Words on paper cannot adequately convey the sense of honor and
gratitude with which I joined your ranks this week. I accepted Purdue’s presidency last June with a sense of
profound respect for all that this historic institution represents, but the
intervening half year has only served to deepen that conviction.

I have tried to use the time afforded by the first-semer interim to
learn all I could from and about you.
I have made spare-time and weekend "field trips" to the campus, totaling
some seventeen days. These trips
have featured briefings on all the major functions of the school and tours of
many major facilities.

I have spoken to a host of experts across the spectrum of higher
education, including more than a dozen current and past university
presidents. I have visited
campuses including Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, and attended seminars on topics
such as the impact of technology and the restructuring of student
assistance. And I have read as much
as I could manage of the gusher of books, articles, and interviews which are
everywhere these days, predicting major change or even upheaval in American
higher education.

Most useful of all, I have been given the opportunity to meet hundreds
of the faculty and students who are Purdue. In college-by-college leadership meetings and open forum
sessions, and a series of informal lunches, dinners, and evenings in faculty
homes, I have commenced what I hope will become years of cordial and mutually
rewarding relationships. To all
those who attended or arranged these opportunities, heartfelt thanks.

Two themes ran steadily through these conversations. First, that Purdue is an extraordinary
place, making life-changing differences in the lives of its students and often
the lives of people around the world.
Second, that the higher ed world we have known is likely headed for big
change, although I heard a full range of opinions about its nature, extent, and
what if anything Purdue should do to react to it.

I doubt that even the most focused and specialized of Purdue
researchers has failed to notice the criticisms and the sometimes apocalyptic
predictions swirling around higher education these days. They come from outside observers and
lifelong academics and from all points of the philosophical compass.

The most frequent attacks include:

College costs too much and
delivers too little. Students are
leaving, when they graduate at all, with loads of debt but without evidence
that they grew much in either knowledge or critical thinking.

Administrative costs, splurging on "resort" amenities, and an obsession with expensive capital projects have run
up the cost to students without enhancing the value of the education they
receive.

Rigor has weakened. Grade inflation has drained the meaning
from grade point averages and left the diploma in many cases as merely a
surrogate marker for the intelligence required to gain admission in the first
place.

The system lacks accountability
for results. No one can tell if
one school is performing any better than another.

The mission of undergraduate
instruction is increasingly subordinated to research and to work with graduate
students.

Too many professors are spending
too much time "writing papers for each other," researching abstruse topics of
no real utility and no real incremental contribution to human knowledge or
understanding.

Diversity is prized except in the
most important realm of all, diversity of thought. The academies that, through the unique system of tenure,
once enshrined freedom of opinion and inquiry now frequently are home to the
narrowest sort of closed-mindedness and the worst repression of dissident
ideas.

Athletics, particularly in NCAA
Division I, is out of control both financially and as a priority of university
attention.

However fair or unfair these critiques, and whatever their
applicability to our university, a growing literature suggests that the
operating model employed by Purdue and most American universities is antiquated
and soon to be displaced. In the
space of a few weeks last fall, a Time
cover story called for "Reinventing College," a Newsweek cover asked "Is College a Lousy Investment?" and a USA Today page one feature declared "College May Never Be the Same." Other voices, many from inside the
academy, had even more striking assessments. Here is just a tiny sampling:

"Bubbles burst when people catch
on, and there’s some evidence people are beginning to catch on … kind of like
the housing market looked in 2007." (Prof. Glenn Harlan Reynolds, University of
Tennessee)

"Other information industries,
from journalism to music to book publishing, enjoyed similar periods of success
right before epic change enveloped them, seemingly overnight…Colleges and
universities could be next, unless they act to mitigate the poor choices and
inaction from the lost decade by looking for ways to lower costs, embrace
technology and improve education."
(Jeff Selingo, editorial director, Chronicle
of Higher Education)

"Strip away the fancy degrees, the
trendy fluff classes, and the personal gadgets, and a new generation of
indebted and jobless students has about as much opportunity as the ancient
indentured Helots." (Victor Davis Hanson, Stanford University)

"(U)niversities will be committing
slow-motion suicide if they fail to revolutionize their classroom-based models
of instruction…The status quo is already disintegrating." (Ann Kirschner, dean at Macaulay Honors
College, the City University of New York)

"In fifty years, if not much
sooner, half the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the
United States will have ceased to exist…nothing can stop it…(T)he residential
college will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose
their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten
years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students." (Nathan Harden,
writing in The American Interest
magazine)

And, most succinctly and perhaps
most credibly, from Stanford’s esteemed President John Hennessy: "There’s a
tsunami coming."

Well, with full respect for President Hennessy, he wouldn’t be the
first seismologist to issue a warning about an earthquake that never
happened. Still, it seems prudent
to ask, given a risk of such an event, how a coastal community should
respond. There are three possible
categories: 1) "It’s a false alarm.
Forget about it." 2) "There
may be a tsunami, but don’t worry, it’s not coming here." 3) "Get busy, just in case."

I’ve been party to the overreading of trends and the overreactions it
can cause; these mistakes have taught me never to be dismissive of criticism or
warnings, but also to move cautiously in response. And it’s become my firm conviction these last few months that, whatever the
validity of the statements above, Purdue has a chance to set itself apart as a
counterexample to much of the criticism lodged against higher ed in
general.

Presented with such a possibility, we have a duty to seize it. We would fail our duty of stewardship
either to ignore the danger signs all around us, or to indulge in denial and
the hubris that says that we are somehow uniquely superb and immune.

In fairness, I heard very little talk like that during my semester of "freshman orientation." Instead, I
found an openness, and often an eagerness, to embrace departures from existing
practices, with the goal of lifting our university to a higher plane of
national and world esteem. Based
on the reading and listening of these last few months, here are a few
observations and some suggestions for our collective attention at the outset of
my service:

Excellence – Now and then the most obvious
truth bears restatement. One such
truth is that Purdue is not its buildings, or even its wonderful past and
traditions. Purdue at any point in
time is its faculty, its students, and the magic that happens when they are brought
together effectively. What the
legendary President Robert Hutchins said of the University of Chicago a century
ago is true of Purdue now: "This would be a great university if it met in a
tent."

Gathering and husbanding resources for investment in best-in-class
faculty, and actions that maximize faculty interaction with students, most
particularly including undergraduates, must be top priorities, on all our
campuses, this year and every year.
Our preeminence in research must not merely be maintained, but strengthened. Excellence in the new era will likely
have to be based on something more than reputation. Performance, especially in the intellectual growth of
students, will have to be measured, quantified, and documented. Why should our university, already
strong in the few indirect measurements that exist, not be a leader in taking
accountability for the excellence to which it lays claim?

Affordability – There is no denying and no
defending it: College costs have exploded in America, especially in the last
decade or so. Student debt has soared past a trillion dollars, amounting to far
more than total credit card debt.

Every university community should embrace the shared responsibility to
reexamine current practices and expenditures with a determination to keep its
tuition and fees within the reach of every qualified student. We should all remind ourselves every
day that the dollars we are privileged to spend come, for the most part, from
either a family or a taxpayer. We
measure many activities by FTEs, full-time equivalents; we should likewise see
every $10,000 we spend as an "STE," a student tuition equivalent. Any unnecessary expenditure of that
amount could instead have enabled a student to attend Purdue for a full year.

Shared governance – I subscribe entirely to the
concept that major decisions about the university and its future should be made
under conditions of maximum practical inclusiveness and consultation. The faculty must have the strongest
single voice in these deliberations, but students and staff should also be
heard whenever their interests are implicated. I will work hard to see that all viewpoints are fairly heard
and considered on big calls, including the prioritization of university
budgetary investments, and endeavor to avoid surprises even on minor matters to
the extent possible.

Shared governance implies shared accountability. It is neither equitable or
workable to demand shared governing power but declare that cost control or
substandard performance in any part of Purdue is someone else’s problem. We cannot improve low on-time
completion rates and maximize student success if no one is willing to modify
his schedule, workload, or method of teaching.

Participation in governance also requires the willingness to make choices. "More for everyone" or "Everyone gets
the same" are stances of default, inconsistent with the obligations of
leadership.

Engagement
– A hallmark of our land-grant
mission is the duty to extend our boundaries beyond the campus, to the
borders
of our state and sometimes beyond.
Where once we exported primarily progress in agricultural science, today
the opportunity and therefore the duty is much wider. An area of much
recent success, but requiring continued
emphasis and development, lies in the more rapid and continuous transfer
of
Purdue technology into the marketplace.
We must produce and recruit scholars imbued with a passion to see their
genius converted swiftly into goods and services that improve human
life,
scholars who say as one of Purdue’s most renowned faculty leaders said
to me, "It’s not an innovation until it’s useful to someone." There is
no greater societal
contribution we could make to a nation struggling to maintain economic
opportunity and upward mobility, and there is no more tangible way to
demonstrate to our fellow citizens the high return their investments of
tax
dollars in us can bring.

The definition of our targets for engagement does warrant ongoing
reflection. As I moved from
college to college in my visits to Purdue, the zeal for "global" activities was
everywhere, but often unfocused and of widely varying clarity of purpose. A question another great university I
visited is asking itself right now may be useful for us as well: "Are we a
global university, or an American university with a global perspective?" I have no firm view on this issue other
than that any activities beyond our home state’s borders should be carefully
chosen, meaningful in impact, and designed for excellence in execution.

Open inquiry – A university violates its
special mission if it fails to protect free and open debate. It is the wellspring of advancing
knowledge and the rationale for academic freedom. No one can expect his views to be free from vigorous
challenge, but all must feel completely safe in speaking out. One can hope for a climate of courtesy
and civility, and "speech" that attempts to silence or intimidate others must
be confronted strongly, but the ensuring of free expression is paramount. This is if anything even more important
when the point of the expression is to criticize decisions of the university
administration itself.

Common purpose – A priceless asset of any great
university is the independence of its faculty and the frequent individual
breakthroughs, in both teaching and research, that it produces. Again and again, as I have moved
through the colleges and gatherings of faculty, I heard the phrase "independent
contractors" used to describe the working relationship between the school and
its professors.

Similarly, I was struck forcefully by the separation among our eleven
colleges. A newcomer quickly
notices that we are less a "university" than a federation. Obviously,
specialization and
intellectual autonomy enable the excellence we seek. But, for instance,
the widespread duplication of identical
functions can work against the common goal we must have of affordability
and
liberating resources for new investments in faculty and facilities. As
so often in life, the phrase "Fine, up to a point" applies.

I hope to find, and perhaps here and there to foster, a somewhat
stronger sense of common purpose as we work through the decisions presented to
us by a changed environment. Without knowing what they will be or when we will
make them, many choices will necessitate a communitarian outlook that
consciously places the interests of the overall university first.

These are but a few preliminary thoughts, each of them stimulated and
informed by the interactions of the last six months. As I often said during the Q&A forums of last fall, I
reserve the right to be instructed otherwise, and to reverse field when shown I
should. But I do urge that we
engage on these issues, as many of us as are willing, because the seismologists
could well be right this time.

Maybe the oldest quip (certainly the tiredest) in the higher ed
lexicon is "the fights are so fierce because the stakes are so low." It’s a great line, and undoubtedly rang
true when coined. But the stakes aren’t low anymore. We may well need to fight less fiercely and rally together
somewhat more often.

My fundamental observation and greatest source of excitement about the
chance to enlist with you is that Purdue, already a leader, has a chance to
separate further from the pack. In
a market now demanding value for the education dollar, we plainly offer
it. While others offer curriculum
of weak rigor and dubious relevance, we are a proud outlier. As I said to my fellow freshmen at
Boiler Gold Rush, "You have chosen a tough school. Congratulations!"

And in a world dependent for growth on the rate and quality of
technological innovation, Purdue, given the high quality of its discovery and
research talent, has a chance to dazzle and deliver. From times of stress and difficulty, in any category of
endeavor, strong and farsighted enterprises emerge stronger than before. If there is in fact to be a shakeout in
higher education, let’s resolve ourselves that Purdue will not merely survive
but thrive, and find itself much higher than today, in the first rank of the
world’s great centers of learning.

Among the many traditions I admire about our university is its
preference not to recognize the arrival of a new president with any kind of
ceremony. That suits me fine; if
an investiture event had been the custom, I’d have tried to beg out of it. To me, one can best honor a position
like this one by simply showing up and going to work. Thank you for letting me do that, and for the marvelously
warm welcome you have shown an eager newcomer.

For our first century as a nation, U.S. presidents did not travel to
Congress and deliver State of the Union orations, they simply wrote them and
sent them up to be read at Congress’ convenience. I liked that tradition, too, and thought it better to
imitate it here, rather than to create the extra work and possibly the
disruption of a staged speech.

The spoken part can come next, in what I hope will be countless
conversations and consultations about the questions and suggestions presented
in this letter. By now it should
be apparent that I take up these duties with no agenda other than to strengthen
further this magnificent institution, and to help it excel and prosper in
whatever new environment it is forced to operate.

In a recent biography of Dwight Eisenhower, a Columbia history
professor of that time is quoted as saying of Ike’s tenure as Columbia’s
president, "He didn’t mess things up.
That’s what one hopes for in a President."

Maybe, as in a physician, that’s the first thing one hopes for.
But somehow I imagine that most of you join me in much higher
expectations and larger dreams.
Those who do share those higher aspirations know that we can achieve
them only by combining, in thought, talent, word and deed, in the common
purpose of preserving what is best today and creating what is better still
tomorrow in the Purdue that can be.